Abstracts - Earli

It has been argued that nearly all phenomena in the natural and social sciences may becharacterized as complex systems, that is, systems in which at a micro-level there are elements oragents that interact with each other and the environment based on often simple rules and thatorganize based on these interactions, often with higher order and qualitatively different propertiesemerging at a macro-level of the system. The multi-disciplinary study of complex systems over thepast quarter of a century has led to the articulation of important new conceptual perspectives andmethodologies that are of value both to researchers in these fields as well as to professionals,policy makers, and citizens who must deal with challenging social and global problems in the 21stcentury. Given the increasing importance of knowledge emerging from the study of complexsystems, there are perhaps three core issues from an educational perspective that must beanswered. First, are there distinctive conceptual perspectives and "ways of thinking" aboutcomplex systems that experts in this area have compared to novices? There is preliminary researchthat suggests this is in fact the case. A second core issue concerns the "learnability" of these ideasfor students at the pre-college and even college levels. As will be reviewed in the conferencepaper, a growing body of research is documenting that students at the pre-graduate school levelcan in fact learn core knowledge that is being articulated by scientists who study complex physicaland social systems. The third issue concerns the potential of infusing core concepts derived fromthe study of complex systems—such as self-organization, feedback, and emergent properties thathave been found to be relevant in both the physical and social sciences—into the K-16 curriculum.The conference paper will elaborate on each of these three issues.Actions Across Levels (AAL): A multiple levels perspective on what it means to make sense ofcomplex systemsSharona Levy, University of Haifa, IsraelUri Wilensky, Northwestern University, SingaporeFurthering our understanding of what it means to make sense of complex systems is becoming apressing imperative, as educational systems begin incorporating such constructs into standardcurricula. We propose a framework, Actions Across Levels (AAL), for understanding andinvestigating how people reason about complex systems. This framework consists of twodimensions: description levels and mental actions undertaken while interpreting systems. Thenotion of levels is a central component in agent-based approaches, specifying both individualagents and the overall system’s emergent behavior. Thus, one dimension in the AAL framework isthe description level: agent, aggregate or a méêlange of the two. The second dimension introducesthree mental actions, involved in reasoning about systems. Rule-making: connecting conditionsand actions, which govern agents’ behaviors as they respond to their environment or internalstates; relating global changes and affected properties; or combinations of the two; Paralleling:operating multiple interacting agents concurrently; Chaining: observing or deriving a sequence ofstates, temporal changes in the system and/or its elements. In previous work, we investigatedsixth-grade students’ reasoning about ordinary complex systems, discovering a pervasive strategy:"mid-level construction". We have found that students invent intermediate groups in one of twotrajectories: starting from the agents and grouping; or starting from the aggregate and partitioning.We have also found that students who formed groups by grouping agents entertained a greaterrange of complexity ideas. In this study, we further explicate this strategy by coding the aboveinterviews using the AAL framework. We have located group strengths regarding the differentcomponents, and found associations between an individual student’s strengths and the specificforms of "mid-level" s/he creates. We discuss these findings with respect to support for the AALframework and reported difficulties in learning and teaching complex systems.– 50 –